It seems like there was a bit of a lull at the various digital distribution outlets in the post-Christmas period, as they all took a rest from the mega bargains. Your wallets respite is over now though. As we enter February, some proper deals are kicking off. Read on to find this week’s highlights, and be sure to check out SavyGamer.co.uk whenever you want to know what games are cheap.King Arthur: The Role-playing Wargame – £2.24/€2.99/$2.99
Also available is The Saxons expansion for £1.05/€1.35/$1.49 or the Complete Edition for £8.99/€11.69/$11.99 which includes The Saxons and the recently released The Druids expansion.
Jim seemed to quite like this when he told use wot he thought:

At the broadest level, King Arthur looks like a Total War game set in a fantasy universe. The action steps between a turn-based map of Britain, and real-time battlefield strategy maps in which you control your units from an omniscient camera in the sky. So far, so Medieval, but this is very much its own game: the field of battle is littered with fantasy units – translucent alien elf-things, giants, ludicrously armoured warriors, and generals who look like a cross between Sauron in armoured form, and a Power Ranger. There’s also an arsenal of magic spells to be accessed via an RPG-lite levelling up of your knights.

Apogee Bundle – £9.28/€11/$14.95
Includes (and individual pricing):
Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold – £2.97/€3.53/$4.79
Blake Stone: Planet Strike – £2.97/€3.53/$4.79
Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition – £2.97/€3.53/$4.79
Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project – £2.97/€3.53/$4.79
Rise of the Triad: Dark War – £2.97/€3.53/$4.79
Oh hey, I’ve played DN3D. Last time I played it wasn’t too long ago, I remember being surprised at how well it still held up. Who knows how DNF will compare to it? I’d hazard a guess that you won’t get people talking about how it still holds up 15 years after it comes out, but perhaps it will be a good silly FPS like DN3D was. I’ve not played the rest, so you’re on your own for them as usual.

Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising – £3.10/€3.68/$5
This is a US only offer, however it seems that THQ’s definition of a US citizen is “someone who can enter a US address on a webform”, and by entering a fake address and paying by Paypal, I was able to access these deals. Since you just get a code to plug into Steam, once you’ve got that, you’re fine. Dawn of War 2 is also down to £4.67/€5.52/$7.50, it just seemed like the expansion at that price was the better headline deal.

Darksiders – £6.21/€7.36/$10
Same deal as Dawn of War, stick in a fake USA address and pay via Paypal if you want to access this deal from outside of the States. This registers on Steam too. I played this on the funbox 360, and though it was pretty genuinely horrible. It’s a flabby hodgepodge of ideas from games you’ve probably already played, patronising unskippable tutorials, and ugly looking everything. It does contain a lot of wandering about at a very slow pace, so if you’re into that sort of thing, give this a go. Some people enjoyed it, but I’d say you’d be better off with probably any of the Zelda games. (NO ONE IS BETTER OFF WITH ZELDA GAMES, FUCKING FAIRIES – Jim.)

Deal of the weekAI War: Fleet Command – £3.38/€4.74/$6.78
Also on sale are:The Zenith Remnant – £2.70/€3.04/$3.38Children of Neinzul – £1.01/€1.01/$1.47
Not only are these clever strategy strategy games for nerds that like clever strategy games, but they also have probably the best DRM set up I’ve seen. Stop me if I’m wrong (because it’s hard remembering everything), but I think you get a DRM free version from GamersGate, but the same serial used to activate that can be used to activate the game on Steam, or indeed on the version downloaded direct from Arcen. If you do opt to add it to Steam, it doesn’t even use Steam as DRM, so you can run the Steam installed version without even having Steam running if you like. AI war has just had a major update and new expansion too. RPS coverage here, and demo here.

I loved Darksiders – it has the genes of Soul Reaver (one of the PS’s best ever games) and is nowhere near as repetitive as a Zelda title – under £10 you’d have to hate action games altogether not to get your money’s-worth…

I think there’s a danger of mixing ‘deals’ with ‘opinion’ here – it’s one thing to tell someone something is cheap, it’s another deciding you’re in a position to tell them whether the deal is worthwhile or not/…

You’re mistaking “amusing writing” for Lewie’s skewed opinion – he does deals and not reviews for a reason y’know ;)

Seriously tho – there’s a massive risk of conflating your experiences and values with other people’s. Reviews which consider ‘value’ are worthless anyway when a game goes from £39.99 to £12.99 to £7 – it’s why reviewers seldom tread on the issue of costs/values of games (unless there’s an obvious parallel).

Just deals without opinion would be a lot less valuable to me. I wouldn’t even be able to play all the games that are available for cheap these days. That’s why the bargain bucket fits in well here on RPS. Context matters. :)

i quite like to see a bit of opinion in there. If nothing else I’ve found on more than one occassion that an impassioned defence of a game in response to a negative appraisal has actual been the tipping point for me buying it, particularly in the bargain threads when it’s quite often worth a punt on games whose quality have been called into question.

Actually Lewie does some reviewing on his site too and I’ve always quite liked his writing style. Your mileage may vary of course. Plus I find the opinion given in this context can be really interesting. Even if you think it shouldn’t be the case, there are games that would be a rip-off at £20 that are well worth £2.

I’m playing Darksiders right now and finding it pretty great. Don’t remember any tutorial sections at all, so I’m not sure what Lewie is on about there, and yes it is most certainly a hodepodge of ideas lifted from other games in the genre…but since when is that such a big problem? It’s a very, very tightly executed hodgepodge. The combat in particular is about as good as it gets in this type of game, both frantic and deep. If you’re into this kind of 3d-brawling-with-a-spot-of-exploration-and-upgrading-and-puzzles game, then this is the next best thing to Arkham Asylum. There’s a reason it has a gamerankings score of ~83%.

The PC version does have two big problems, though. First, absolutely no graphics options. I mean nothing. You can change your resolution, and turn Vsync on and off. That’s it. Seriously. Second, although this game is obviously best played with a controller, like some other recent games it only works with an xbox360 controller. You can get under the hood a bit with 360 controller emulation and make it work, but come on, they really couldn’t be bothered to program in support for non-360 controllers?

Apparently that’s usually an XNA thing – here, you can use this free framework to make your PC and Xbo360 cross-compatible game, but it can’t support non-Microsoft controllers, OK? I’d be tempted to just include something like X360CE in the install package and see what Microsoft said to that.

A friend bought me Dark Siders over christmas, and I must I say I enjoyed it. It’s not amazing, and it rips off practically every game you can think of, but it was a fun enough hack and slash romp.

I played it without issue with a 5 button gaming mouse, which worked fine after some fiddling remapping the controls. I’d advise caution if you don’t have a mouse with at least that many buttons, or a gamepad though. At that price the game is definitely worth a shot, unless you actively hate games like it.

I personally dislike almost every game that Darksiders borrows from and yet really like Darksiders itself. I am curious how long Lewie played the game to complain about slow wandering around. Not only the game has teleportation but also a rather fast mount. Anyhow, I have no problem with the Bargain Bucket posts containing opinions. It’s not like Lewie is any less qualified to speak his mind than everyone else and it’s not like there weren’t some questionable opinion pieces on RPS in the past (yes, THAT one).

And I’ll bet that there’s at least one person who, after reading the comments and seeing the positive thoughts there on Darksiders, has now purchased and is enjoying the game. And I bet those people wouldn’t have left those comments had Lewie not slagged it off. Yes, sometimes he’s a bit harsh. To encourage debate.

Game-opinion-site posts an opinion on a game. Shocker! Seriously, trjp, this place would be better without people like you who think anyone disagreeing with them is an excuse to slag someone off as unprofessional.

Wow. RPS is a money-making enterprise, it isn’t an orphanage or a hospital. People put up articles so that other people will read them. The existence of the site is predicated on visitors clicking through on the ads. This isn’t a charity, and it isn’t a social experiment. This is a business. They provide professional opinion, we, as a group, click on ads.

Darksiders isn’t a bad game. I didn’t hate it, but didn’t think it was brilliant. If I were shameless I’d tell you to read my review, which I am so go read it. The comment that stuck out to me was that it is apparently better on PC, but needs a controller.

On Lewie: Yes, he should give his opinion. He’s allowed to say “I didn’t like this”, and it makes it mean something.

I haven’t played Darksiders, so I don’t know how accurate his opinion is. But surely, it’s best to explain why you disagree with a review? Instead of jumping right to insults and what seems like inventing reasons that the person shouldn’t be allowed to express their opinion at all. I could be wrong, I’ve just never even considered that people would want the Bargain Bucket to remain pure and free of any opinion.

I could understand complaints if he refused to even mention that games he doesn’t like are on sale. But this is a bit too close to “I don’t agree with his opinion, so he shouldn’t be allowed to say it”.

Sadly, a LOT of people didn’t like the demo of AI War. It’s a vigorously niche game with few redeeming qualities. Some people will tell you it’s great but… it really isn’t. Shave a few points off the game design and they could have had a hit, but they wanted to be true to their vision. Their awful, flawed, vision…

It’s also worth pointing out that the PC version of Darksiders has next to no graphics options. You get v-sync and resolution and you can be bloody well happy with it. It runs like shit on my pc though. So bleh to it.

That said, it runs like silk on my machine at 1920×1080 a 3Ghz Q6600 Quad core, ATI Radeon 5770, and 4Gb of DDR2-800 and windows 7 64.
Solid 60fps, no slow down except in a few crazy instances (usually involving many particle effects).

My order has just been cancelled and I’ve just been refunded. Obviously they’ve got wise.
Thing is, it’s still in my Steam account. I don’t mind too much if they get Valve to pull it from my account, but I sure hope the whole thing doesn’t get locked.

I liked Darksiders but it started to show it’s seams after a few hours. Nothing really happens, the gameplay doesn’t developer or deepen. I’ve stopped 11 hours into the game and don’t feel like going on. It’s a shame as the setting and polish of the game is high, it’s a long way from genuinely horrible.

Really? I thought that one of Darksiders strengths was that it never got dull. They keep introducing new stuff (even if plenty is fairly useless outside of specific levels/situations) and overall I felt the game had enough variety to make the 16 hours it took me to finish it rather enjoyable.

Darksiders may not be truly great, and may not have an original idea to its name, yet it executes them all well enough that I would not hesitate to recommend it at this price point.

EDIT: Or to put it in perspective, this is a game where you fight Sandworms, while riding a burning horse and firing a revolver the size of your arm, in a desert made with the ashes of mankind.

I can only second Xocrates recommendation, I really enjoyed my time with Darksiders. Games of its kind don’t come around on the PC platform too often and I found it enjoyable all the way to the last boss.

It’s proof that linear games can be done right unlike Call of Duty. There’s just too many scripted events in that game. A guy with a rocket launcher won’t die no matter how much you shoot him because he’s pretty much a script waiting to be activated when you come closer to him.

Which isn’t actually a complete pack. It omits Myst IV and V. (And III, but III wasn’t Cyan). If it had had those, I’d maybe have been tempted. As is, I don’t have that much interest in owning yet more copies of Myst and Riven.

From what I remember from the heady shareware days of my youth, like DN3D, Blake Stone and Rise of the Triads are ray-casting/pseudo-3D FPSs.

Valuable milestones worthy of investigation for anyone interested in the history of the genre (or of the PC shareware scene) in the post-Doom, pre-Quake era.

Both are slightly more po-faced than DN3D, but not especially so, and given how outlandish some of the Duke’s antics have been this really shouldn’t be overstated. Blake Stone is the older of the two and feels like a colourful Doom/Wolf 3d reskin, if a little slower than the former. Rise of the Triad is a genuinely good game, one that I would be surprised to see fail to give modern day gamers that same ‘holds up well’ feeling as Duke 3D. It has more of that game’s verticality and sense of place than Blake Stone/Wolf/Doom’s more labyrinthine, er, mazes. Level design is excellent, with good flow and secrets stuffed out the bahunga. The aesthetic incorporates a lot of elements, mixing in unequal parts gothic, film noir, sleaze, quake-brown hues and self-effacing humour.

Nothing that won’t seem a mite more tacky and ill-judged to your 20-something self than it would have (or did) to your wide-eyed 13yo of yesteryear, but not at all without a charm of its own.

This Darksider’s malarky is actually tempting me. Though looking back at RPS coverage I see that Jim quit because of a frustrating boss fight early on. Is this sort of thing endemic in the game? If so I don’t think it’s for me. Also how much puzzly Zelda style dungeon action is there or is it more of a mindless hack and slash-a-thon? If it’s got a bit more to it than just bashing things with a sword then I’m probably in.

I think the bosses issue seems to be that they never get stronger while you do. This means that the first bosses are the hardest while everyone else gets increasingly easier. Once you’re past the first boss (second if you count the tutorial) you probably won’t have any big problems.

I didn’t play any zelda games, so I can’t compare, but I can confirm that the game actually has plenty of puzzling/exploration. The game is very much a metroidvania kind of game.

Yeah, there’s a lot of exploring. And a lot of backtracking. There was a bug where the game would crash during one of the boss fights (well, the arena fight) and I’m not sure that got fixed. My first playthrough was fine, but my second was bugged and I couldn’t continue.

I’d advise against it. After slogging through the first few hours of the game I realised I’d just described my experience with it as a ‘slog’. It’s like a fisher price version of all your favourite games – God of War without the showmanship, Zelda without the brains and Metroid without the compelling overworld. A damp squib of a game that attempted to stand on the shoulders of giants, but ended up nestling between their butcheeks before being messily farted across the gaming landscape. Avoid avoid avoid.

I personally found Darksiders extremely repetitive towards the end. The combat is very much one button, and a bit on the shallow side. The subweapons are fairly useless next to your sword, and they level slower because you’ll use them less, which leads to eventually ignoring them.

It doesn’t help that the game just LOVES showing you completely unnecessary cutscenes straight out of the 90s. “Here’s a door — oh wait we’re locking it with a magic seal” Of course, it’s followed by monster spawns, and after you kill them, it shows the obligatory “Oh, looks like you cleared out the monsters. Remember that door from earlier? Oh, hey, it’s unsealed!” After fifteen hours in the game, they’re still showing these “lock-in” cutscenes, and it’s about enough to drive a man mad.

Other thoughts:

– The Shadow Realm parts were utter bullshit. I thought it was just lazy on the part of the devs
– Later enemies (mini-mini-bosses?) are damage sponges
– The timing window on the counter is very generous
– I have no clue why the tunnels between Serpent Holes exist. At all. What a waste of time.
– The pistol is useless
– A bit too many “do this X times” — 3 swords, 3 guardian robots, 7 pieces, 4 spiders, 3 beams, etc
– The Silitha (spider) bossfight was awful
– The other boss fights were pretty good
– The portal gun was really inconsistent when firing portals into portals
– The Panzer Dragoon section was, uh, okay
– Not a particularly difficult game.
– So, so many invisible walls you’ll swear it was the 90s all over again

That said, the puzzle design is relatively solid, and I absolutely adore the Warhammer-ish gothic aesthetic. Despite all this, it comes pretty recommended from me — it’s a good game, just not a great one.

I had the odd bit of boss fight checkpoint frustration, but nothing so annoying it made me stop playing for good. Generally the difficulty seems fairly well pitched although, as others have said, you tend to find the bosses get easier as you become increasingly more powerful.

There is some backtracking, but not too much. How much you end up doing depends on how much of a completionist you are. If you can comfortably ignore scouring old areas for bits of armour and secret areas, there isn’t that much.

Unless the PC version varies enormously from the 360 version – the bosses are all really well designed and anyone hitting a brick wall either isn’t paying attention or hasn’t played too many games…

I’m no expert at this stuff and I found Darksiders to be pitched just nicely – nothing was too frustrating but there was challenge to be had and higher difficulties available if you weren’t finding it.

Darksiders is a type of game you don’t see on PC much – the whining here may explain why – it would be shame if all such games were console-only tho.

I loved Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, but Zelda games have been far too unadventurous in mixing up the formula since. I want to be surprised and do new things in games, not be fed more of the same.

But that’s a discussion for another non-PC forum.

More on the PC side, I think it’s a Japanese mentality – to have far fewer qualms about keeping games feeling mechanically like games from earlier eras, rather than trying to go for something more immersive.

Can anyone weigh in on whether Blood Bowl is worth it if you haven’t played the board game? I’m kind of interested, and this is the first time it’s been at a price I’d consider paying for a game I’ve been um-ing and ah-ing over. I know Kieron loved it, but also said it was a bit rubbish. Anyone tried it without prior experience of it?

As someone that likes the Warhammer setting but has never played the Bloodbowl boardgame I honestly didn’t have a clue what was going on. There’s tutorials, but even after going through them all and playing a few games it all still seemed a bit vague and random to me :/

Will Tomas – I got it a year ago having not played the board game. Its an incredibly well designed game. There is a bit of a learning curve and new players can feel antagonised if they don’t understand why something went wrong (you must read the rule book!), but once you get over that curve you will be rewarded with a deep and very fun game. There is quite a large community of blood bowlers on the RPS forums and a few leagues that have been running for several months now so if you take the plunge be sure to check that out.

You’ll do fine if you haven’t played the boardgame. You will need to read the rulebook, but it’s surprisingly readable, and none of the rules are all that complex, particularly when the computer adjudicates them for you. You will need to understand the basic flow of the game and be able to make rough estimates of the odds of a given play.

You’ll have it down after a game or three. Learning to play well takes a lot longer, but that’s a different thing altogether, and therein lies the joy.

Can anyone weigh in on King Arthur? I read the RPS review from last year, and some other stuff online. I’m undecided, and need the input of you fine folk. For three dollars it seems hard to pass up, but I can’t abide buggy/un-fun battle AI, which is what most reviewers mention.

Decidedly not a fan, personally. The tactical battles devolve into blobbing all your men in one spot to hold up the enemy while your cavalry run around and capture all the special ‘win this battle for no good reason’ points. Either that or you actually try to fight properly, in which case you’ll end up loathing the poor UI / controls. The strategic map had some interesting ideas, but not enough to make up for the bad tactical map.

Oh, and on hard at least (and several hours of tutorialish bits in I did not want to restart), trying to neglect the tactical map and just manage the more fun strategic parts was umm, impossible. The auto-calculate feature literally would lose every battle I tried it on, even when I had every available general and troop together.

currently reading Bernard Cornwell’s Arthurian trilogy so the King Arthur game seems intriguing. Dumnonia (not camelot!), Pagans vs Christians, Brits vs Saxons, rubbish Druids. There isn’t any fantasy in it though.
still, for a couple of quid its got to be worth a pop.

They’re a great trilogy of books. I really do love Bernard Cornwell’s writing. If you havent read his grail quest trilogy yet, I highly recommend it. Probably the best thing he has written in my opinion.

thanks for the recommendation, i’ll check that series out once i’ve finished sharpe (which im about 1/4 of the way through). I do like his writing, theres nothing flowery its just light and entertaining.
The arthurian one was quite hard to get into at first as im not used to him writing in the first person.

I don’t remember a problem with the mouse on the first Overlord game. Maybe a configuration issue?

The first game was okay, but I didn’t buy the second one. Sweeping your minions around as a “weapon” is a cool idea, but it gets old pretty fast. Especially since your supposedly big and scary “Overlord” isn’t worth much in 1v1 combat if you let a baddie get close. I never felt properly evil either, which should be the whole point of this type of game. The quests could have been done by any generic bad-ass hero.

The Dawn of War II: Chaos rising deal is absurdly good. So good, in fact, that it seems to have given me a copy of regular, vanilla DoW II as well, which I hadn’t expected. Has anyone else seen this?

Also, it’s worth noting when you put in an American address that there’s some form of zip code validation going on: put in one that doesn’t confirm and it’ll just reload the page instead of moving to the checkout.

And now my bonus copy of DoW II has dissappeared, leaving only the locked files on my hard drive. Thought it was too good to be true, although I’m interested how the error a) happened and b) got corrected. Is someone from Valve just lurking here?

I think they’re missing a trick though – if that DLC was all Thomas the Tank engine themed then they’d have millions of customers willing to pay 150 quid for the lot. Thankfully it’s not so I can keep my kids away from my Steam account. For now.

Ah, lucky me didn’t have to jump through any hoops to take advantage of the awesome THQ deals. Picked up DOW2 and Chaos Rising, which I’ve been meaning to do for a while, but I’m also somewhat tempted by Metro 2033 and to a lesser extent Darksiders. Unfortunately there are just too many games to play and not enough time, especially with the power of my on going BC 2 addiction.

You know, looking at this list I feel like we no longer need game release dates announced. Just look at what bargains of older stuff suddenly pop up and you have an abover average chance it is because a sequel/addon is around the corner (Dead Space, Blood Bowl, King Arthur, Duke etc).

P.S. I got the whole King’s Bounty pack for 7,50 EUR during christmas. I find it ludicrous to have / re-enact sales that are a HIGHER price than before and still call it a sale. That’s what I really don’t like/understand about these digital sales.

Dunno, I actually felt Darksiders was a graphically competent slasher. I have no idea why these are called Zelda games(more like Kain, no?), as I remember zelda as being a top down, hold down a button to run / slash away at bushes and capture fairies / shoot fire wands at ice to melt it / collect little hearts to bump health type of game, and not anything like a flaming colossus of godly warmachine smashing through everything in his path at all.

Yeah, I can’t help but be slightly worried about this. If they’d just kept the money, there would have been no trouble at all, but if THQ go to Valve and demand that games be pulled or accounts shut down for this? Well, I really hope they don’t do that.

The best-case scenario here is that we got the game for free. The worst-case scenario… I don’t even want to consider that.

If THQ owned Valve, then maybe they might. But they don’t, and there’s no incentive for Valve to ‘punish’ people who have done this. Also, the games are still there. Which says to me Valve aren’t exactly treating sorting this out as a high priority.

Good to know, last time i checked my steam account was worth something like 800 – 1000 squids. I would literally be in tears if I got banned. Im hoping they just remove the game from my list at this point. It would help calm my paranoia.

Ugh, so much worry here… I too have received a refund for my purchase of DoW & expansion, although of course I simply added the keys to Steam and so they currently remain. I’m tempted to just send a message to Steam Support right now clearly stating that I have been refunded the cost of the product and asking that they remove the game and key from my account, but fear that might just cause more trouble. But after all, I wasn’t looking to get these things for “free” in the first place, simply to get a good deal and fairly pay the company their offered price.

The rather ironic part of this thing is not just how long I waffled about with placing the order out of concern that something like this might happen, but that in contrast to most of you UK folks, I’m in Canada and THQ refused my Canadian address just as it refused you folks across the pond. Which is to say, they created a deal unusable in Canada for a product developed IN Canada; and in fact, a product always otherwise available on Steam at the exact same price and offered in the exact same denomination as the US!

Some of THQ’s biggest franchises are developed in Canada, and yet they will not accept a orders from there, even with a currency essentially equal to their own? They don’t even offer a Canadian site! It’s bewildering, frustrating, and most unfortunately, wholly expected. But then, I wouldn’t even be surprised if the only reason a Canadian address could not be used was because they simply forgot to flag it in their order software as “allowed”..

Everyone should stop worrying. It’s quite easy to see what’s happened if we just look at the facts: some lovable internet scamps have tried a cheeky trick to get hold of some of THQ’s wonderful games for a bargain price, but for whatever reason THQ can’t actually accept the order, and so refunds the money. They still want us to keep the games though, because they are such a great company, and they like our spirit, and ready willingness to actually pay for games (even when those games are only available in a country in which we do not currently reside – exactly the type of thing Chaos Space Marines might get up to). Really, it a story of games publisher generosity of Valve-like proportions – so I say: Three Cheers for THQ!
Now, go forth and tell everybody what a clever PR wheeze THQ have just cooked up as a trail for DOWII:Retribution.

Just to add my bit, I bought Dawn of War 2 and Chaos Rising. Got an email saying I have been refunded for DoW2 (but nothing about Chaos Rising) but they are both still in my steam list and downloading as we speak. Will find out if they work soon…

I finally got the refund e-mail for Darksiders. It just says ‘refund’ and doesn’t mention any order cancellation. If the game still works on Steam then it amounts to $10 for US residents and FREE for everyone else. Thank you, THQ !